Hoisting a laser cutter to the 3rd floor (and other fun you’ll probably never have)

The folks at Null Space Labs bought a 40W CO2 laser tube in order to build their own laser cutter. Unfortunately nobody really wants to build a laser cutter; they just want to play with a laser cutter. So they ended up biting the bullet and ordering a $4000 model from China. That’s it hovering in midair. This is the story of acquiring the unit and playing around with it once it arrived.

Check out those orange cones in the picture. Hackerspace members put them out to keep the parking spots clear so no damage was caused in the event of an accident. But since they’re located in Los Angeles some of the road warriors didn’t really care and just moved the cones anyway. Luckily the crane hoist to the third floor (they removed one of the windows) ended up going rather well.

So what do you do with a laser cutter like this one? Crack it open and make some improvements. The manufacturer says it can’t cut through steel. Well that’s only if you don’t add some O2 to the cutting process. And the stock mirrors… they’ve got to go. Turns out a simple upgrade boosted the power by about 20% (we’re wondering how they measured that). While we’re talking about optics, might as well upgrade the lens as well. You can see where they’re going with this, and [CharlieX] tells us it is just the first in a series of posts he’ll be working on.

I gather from the article they measure how much material the unit can cut through in a certain amount of time in order to gauge improvements. That is why (I think) that they give the numbers as a percentage instead of a measure such as Watts.

No we didn’t, but we have cut steel sheets which is really useful for a lot of things and its a lot more than most people are doing with this type of laser.

A 600W+ laser is needed with no gas assist (obviously depending on the thickness). We’re working on changing the 90W to a 170W tube which will take us up to a decent amount, 150W will cut 2mm steel no problem, even 3.1750mm. Its not like its a new thing.

Basically what they are doing is cutting like you would with a torch. The flame on a torch is only needed to get the metal hot enough where it will burn in the presence of oxygen, and that is what is happening in their pictures. You can tell by the heat affected zone (HAZ). Normal laser cutting has almost no HAZ and a much smaller kerf. What they have is laser ignited oxygen burning.

We have a similar laser (80watt toob, though) at heatsync labs in Phoenix.

The software it comes with is actually pretty awesome, and I’ve heard this from several different people. In fact, a friend of mine has access to both an epilogue (is that how it’s spelled? I don’t know), and a chinese laser at her lab, and she’s said that most people end up using the chinese one, partially because of the software.

(The software is good because epilogue treats the laser like a printer. Setting speed/power stuff is complicated. The “crappy” chinese software is a lot more intuitive. It just sucks for designing anything.)